School District Suspends Teacher Who Spoke to Media About Stephen Miller
Maybe don’t talk to the media?
Professor Jacobson blogged yesterday about the media’s continued attacks on President Donald Trump’s advisor Stephen Miller. This time, Miller’s third grade teacher Nikki Fiske spoke to The Hollywood Reporter and described Miller as a loner who ate glue.
Her school district has now suspended her.
From The Los Angeles Times:
The Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District has placed veteran teacher Nikki Fiske on “home assignment” while it decides what to do, if anything, about disclosures she made about a young Stephen Miller.
—
The school district’s concern is “about her release of student information, including allegations that the release may not have complied with applicable laws and district policies,” said district spokeswoman Gail Pinsker.
“This has been picked up by other digital publications and blogs, and some issues have been raised,” Pinsker said.
Fiske told The Hollywood Reporter:
I can still picture him sitting in my classroom.
Do you remember that character in Peanuts, the one called Pig Pen, with the dust cloud and crumbs flying all around him? That was Stephen Miller at 8. I was always trying to get him to clean up his desk — he always had stuff mashed up in there. He was a strange dude. I remember he would take a bottle of glue — we didn’t have glue sticks in those days — and he would pour the glue on his arm, let it dry, peel it off and then eat it.
I remember being concerned about him — not academically. He was OK with that, though I could never read his handwriting. But he had such strange personal habits. He was a loner and isolated and off by himself all the time.
At the end of the year, I wrote all my concerns — and I had a lot of them — in his school record. When the school principal had a conference with Stephen’s parents, the parents were horrified. So the principal took some white-out and blanked out all my comments. I wish I could remember what I wrote, but this was 25 years ago. I’ve taught a lot of third-graders since then. Of course, Stephen wasn’t political then — it wasn’t until later that he started to make waves.
This isn’t the first time Miller’s third grade has come to the light. Politico allowed a classmate of Miller’s at that time to pen an op-ed for the publication:
Because of our last names, Stephen and I shared a desk. We were not friends, though we weren’t exactly enemies, either. Our teacher, Mrs. Fiske, had the class write stories each week with vocabulary words, and sometimes she let us read them aloud. I wrote a series of stories about a “mixed-up chicken” named Jeremy. I felt proudest, that year, when I got to read my stories in class and they made the other kids laugh.
It was difficult to make Stephen laugh. I found him difficult to reach at all, and so, it seemed, did most everyone else. He was frequently distracted, vacillating between total disinterest in everything around him—my stories, of course, included—and complete obsession with highly specific tasks that could only be performed alone.
He especially was obsessed with tape and glue. Along the midpoint of our desk, Stephen laid down a piece of white masking tape, explaining that it marked the boundary of our sides and that I was not to cross it. The formality of this struck me as odd. I was a fairly neat kid, at least at school, and I had never spread my things to his side of the desk. Stephen, meanwhile, could not have been much messier: His side of the desk was sticky and peeling, littered with scraps of paper, misshapen erasers and pencil nubs.
Who didn’t have awkward times while growing up? I believed in Santa until 4th grade. When you can’t get enough of demonizing a person, why not go to his childhood? I wonder what kind of dirt we would dig up on these people who go after Miller and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh?
But we won’t because we’re decent human beings.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Good, but she deserves more than a time out. Pull her license too.
She is an old teacher who does not recognize high functioning autism, probably Asperger Syndrome. Mr Miller is Jewish, the Miller name is generally associated with German’s. That means that he is an Ashkenazi Jew, literally from the smartest group of all humanity, with an average IQ of 112.
Of course he was disinterested, she was not presenting anything challenging enough to engage him. His skills are probably focused in narrow areas, he is probably highly analytical. Of course she cannot understand him, and as a result she was a piss poor teacher.
I am Asperger, I had one Asperger child, and one grandchild is Asperger, ten years old and programming in a handful of languages, and most of his teachers work well with him.
Normal children generally go on to live normal lives, those strange children go on to become great in their chosen fields. They become the best of the best and drive humanity’s advancement.
This teacher is full of crap.
I learned about Aspergers too late.
My late brother suffered from it. When I described his behavior growing up and my frustrations with him to a PhD of Ed. Psych who specialized in autism, she told me about it.
It explained his fixation on electronics.
Sadly, his wife divorced him not understanding who he really was. If she had understood his fixations and cut him some slack, I think he would still be alive today.
I am sorry to hear about how things turned out for your son, both Asperger and high intelligence which often accompanies it are difficult to deal with.
Even though Dr Asperger identified children who he characterized as little geniuses in the mid forties,no one ever told me what I was, and that would have made life much easier. I first got an inclining when Star Trek came out with Spock, in that I am very much like the character Spock.
What got me through childhood and early adulthood was that I found friendship with adults satisfying. I had run of a university from 7th grade on and had many professors and students as mentors. I started my first business when I was 19, my early and mid life peer group were made up of people fifty and up.
30-40 years ago I wrote about these issues with children, and received many letters and emails from parents thanking me for explaining to them about what their children needed.
She’s 72 years old. She’s on paid leave. She’ll milk that fat pension and laugh to her grave. Some punishment.
There exist grounds to sue her in tort (invasion of privacy) as well as threaten her pension for breaching school privacy rules.
I really wonder about those who claim to remember an, at the time, insignificant student, out of the many who she must’ve taught.
Another example of a 35+ year old event that’s recalled in order to denigrate someone. How can this womxn (heh) even be sure that she’s remembering the right person? After all Steven Miller is a fairly common name.
I wonder about her memory too. I also wonder if he or the other boys were eating glue. I never saw or knew anyone that ate glue or was afraid of clowns in my NYC grade school. Bozo was on TV; who could be afraid of clowns back then? We did however go through bottles of glue, specifically rubber cement. We would pour out the glass bottles with the metal tops and glue brush lids inside the metal desks, let the rubber cement glue dry and then peel it and roll the glue into some massive super balls which we would bounce all through the school at the most inappropriate times.
Instead of a student eating glue, this old bag of crap was probably sniffing it.
As a “veteran” teacher, she knew that she was breaking the rules. She was probably planning to get “leftist immunity”.
Hopefully there is more of this for awhile. It’s ridiculous and pathetic……and most clear thinking people recognize this as a desperate attempt of a group of losers. They should be punished in the most American of ways……on Election Day.
Granted, I’m sure Stephen Miller can deal with this, but this is a form of child abuse is some less than subtle way.
After a while you get used to it.
I late elementary school I was desperate for friends, but I had absolutely nothing in common with other children my age. I was frail, and frequently beat up, often by older boys. I remember a meeting with my parents and the principal where she said that boys would be boys and that I would have to take my lumps. After I had gone through many phases of scientific interests, plants, bugs, rocks, weather, and at that time chemistry. So I mixed up something which I sprayed in the ringleader’s eyes, and then beat the living crap out of him in front of his fan club. When I say living crap, he was out of school for a week. That same principal then wanted to expel me, at which point she was told there would be a lawsuit, and that ended the discussion.
At that point I decided I no longer wanted bonehead friends. Friendship seemed to be predicated on cow towing to knuckleheads.
Can anyone imagine Odumbo’s grade school records?
“Barry picks his nose, and continually fails to study the Koran.”
LMAO!!!!!!! So true!
When did he ever stop?
https://tinyurl.com/y7gk4rf2
This is spooky. Miller is starting to sound like my long-lost twin.
In case anybody gets us confused, I’m the one with more hair.
Back in the day, glue was a condiment.
3rd grade? I wonder if South Park will run with it, though they did a horrible job with kavanaugh, which to me looked like a bunch of notes from the front office.
Glue contains some acetate, which is the sour acid in vinegar. Some children find this taste intriguing having a young and naive palate. It is nothing serious and a rather mild form of pica as these things go.
Regardless, this is one of the dumbest things I’ve seen in a long time in a history of media dumbness and an entire POTUS term of insanity, thus far.
You lured the reader in with interesting fact, then stabbed him in the back.
The only “insanity” is on the LEFT, as Nikki Fisk so criminally demonstrated.
To be quite clear, the media insanity I am referring to is not the current article but rather the NYT “investigation” that led to this follow up piece.
And to be finally clear, the POTUS term of insanity refers to the media cycle coverage surrounding this presidency, not the presidency itself.
It’s like bipolar disorder compared to the Obama fluff cycle.
I wonder how much of the lens of “it wasn’t until later that he started to make waves” influences Nikki Fiske’s memory of Stephen Miller. Moreover, both she and the classmate are adults now, yet nothing from them about what might have been taking place in Miller’s world for him to exhibit the behavior he did. On the other hand, sometimes such behavior is a kid just being a kid. Nitwits.
Stephen is brilliant and his knowledge of history stunning.
So glad President Trump recognized his immense value.
I came to the same conclusions as Mr. Miller about immigration. No more Muslims, because they will not assimilate, and because their 1400 years of inbreeding is bad for our gene pool. There should be a moratorium (with very limited exceptions based on merit) from the south because of 20-30 million who are already here illegally. We need to find a way to expel those. Every illegal who demands rights needs to be immediately deported, with their whole family.
Why is this a story for the American media? Behavior of a 20 yo boy? They are scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Heck, I am way out of 4th grade and I still believe in Santa!
When I was in kindergarten I took a battery-powered toy gun to show and tell. Yes, you could do that back in the 1960s. As long as pulled the trigger back it would keep making machine gun noises, and a light bulb at the end of the barrel kept flashing. And I wanted everyone in class to know it.
Later I took it out on the playground, tripped, fell on it, and broke it in two. I cried. A lot.
I just wanted to get ahead of this story because I hear the AP, NYT, and the WaPo are going to publish it tomorrow under the title, “Arminius, Trump Appellate Court Nominee, Was Barely Stopped From Becoming A School Shooter.”